Site Search Navigation

Site Navigation

Site Mobile Navigation

Moving Billions of People on a Still-Green Planet?

By Andrew C. Revkin January 11, 2008 9:12 amJanuary 11, 2008 9:12 am

Traffic on Storrow Drive in Boston. (Jodi Hilton for The New York Times)

Jesse Ausubel, who studies, well, everything at Rockefeller University’s Program for the Human Environment, has long been exploring patterns of development and their broader consequences. He’s a quirky, sometimes prickly, thinker who, for example, sees a fossil fuel, methane, as a keystone — and greatly neglected — resource serving as a bridge to a climate-friendly energy future.

With the unveiling of India’s $2,500 Nano car, and my post last night looking ahead to the near-certain prospect of a global car population of 1 billion or more within little more than a decade, Prof. Ausubel sent me links to a couple of papers he co-authored awhile back envisioning green mobility on a global scale.

Here’s the summary of “Toward green mobility — the evolution of transport,” which originally appeared in the European Review a decade ago and is online at Rockefeller’s Web site (it’s still a worthwhile read, as a reflection on what drives us to be mobile, and a vision of what might lie ahead):

We envision a transport system producing zero emissions and sparing the surface landscape, while people on average range hundreds of kilometers daily. We believe this prospect of ‘green mobility’ is consistent in general principles with historical evolution. We lay out these general principles, extracted from widespread observations of human behavior over long periods, and use them to explain past transport and to project the next 50 to 100 years. Our picture emphasizes the slow penetration of new technologies of transport adding speed in the course of substituting for the old ones in terms of time allocation. We discuss serially and in increasing detail railroads, cars, airplanes, and magnetically levitated trains (maglevs).

The other paper is The Evolution of Transport, which appeared in The Industrial Physicist in 2001 and can be found as a pdf at this Web site: http://www.tipmagazine.com/0401.html .

The thesis painted in both is that the history of transport points to more speed and connectedness per dollar over time. The question is can this system transform into one that is also free of costs to the environment. That will take sustained work toward a long-term goal, which would divert somewhat from the happenstance nature of how transportation networks have evolved in the past.

Prof. Ausubel and his co-authors say technological advances and growing wealth could lead, over a century, toward quite a grand vision:

A century or more is the rational time for conceiving a transport system. The infrastructures last for centuries. They take 50-100 years to build, in part because they also require complementary infrastructures. Railroads needed telegraphs, and paved roads needed oil delivery systems so that gasoline would be available to fill empty car tanks. Moreover, the new systems take 100 years to penetrate fully at the level of the consumer. Railroads began in the 1820s and peaked with consumers in the 1920s.

Fortunately, during the next century we may be able to afford green mobility. In fact, we can clearly see its elements: cars, powered by fuels cells; aeroplanes, powered by hydrogen; and maglevs, powered by electricity, probably nuclear. The future looks clean, fast, and green.

Howard Frumkin, the director of the National Center for Environmental Health, has been championing the ancillary benefits, including better health, that come when communities and their transportation choices are shaped around the environment. Here’s a recent paper.

How long do you think it will take the human community to move from where we are now to the “Green Future” both of you are anticipating.

I am concerned that our “Still-Green Planet” will be ravaged by human overconsumption, overproduction and overpopulation activities, now threatening to engulf the Earth, before humanity can make the transition from dirty and relatively slow transportation systems we have today to the “clean, fast” ones Jesse anticipates in his grand vision.

One of TheCityFix.com’s contributors, Benjamin de la Pena, wrote a provocative post about pedicabs – what are often referred to as “road roaches” – as a viable form of green transport if urban planners and ordinary citizens would take it seriously. You can read it here:

One of the most sustainable methods of transportation that urban communities can practice is bicycling. Ryan and Durning’s book “Stuff” says that bicycling ‘consumes less energy than any other form of transportation…even walking.’ One sustainable idea might be a better infrastructure for bicyclists to encourage growth of something that might help with our obesity problem too.

The interesting thing is when i look at this I see this: Ok we can actually fix the emissions problem through multiple solutions. Which goes a long way towards cleaning our environment and dealing with respiratory problems. However the overall goal of driving these large numbers of people brings me to another problem that we’re not facing: the fact that we’ll have 9 billion people in 40 years and that’s not going to be a plateau but a mark we’ll pass as our population increases.

So far the easiest seeming way to do that is increase the standards of living for everyone in the world. Since as what happens in the west seems to hold true in many other wealthy countries: money goes up, family size goes down.

There are other options for this but the overall idea is the same, we need to stabilize our population so we can contain our overall impact on the biosphere. This is the next goal.

This is yet another interesting discussion about preserving the environment that completely avoids mention of population control, without which all other initiatives are bound to fail.

Fortunately, in poor developing countries, a lower birth rate means less mouths to feed, less hunger, less poverty, less subjugation of women, better education for children, and so on. The Bush administration’s gag rule, which has crippled our ability to disseminate birth control information to poor countries, thus emerges as one of the most important anti-environmental actions of this regressive administration.

The problem is that the success of most economic systems in developed countries has been predicated on growth.The conundrum is how do we stifle growth in America without causing economic collapse. All other discussions are peripheral.

I will read the papers regarding transportation evolution. I’m sure they contribute to the debate, but what little I know about them suggests that they are well off the mark. Past performance is no indication of future returns. Transportation has so far evolved to be faster, for example, but product improvement is a natural consequence of trade in any free-market product. Product improvement is not a property of the product (in this case, transporation), it is a property of free markets.

Pedestrian transport is quite effective. The only “problem” with it is that those who partipate in unfettered free markets can earn a return on capital by selling alternatives to pedestrian transport (where “selling” should be read in the prejorative sense). We (all of us, our society) should simply arrange our affairs through taxation, regulation, and cuts to subsidies so that investors make other choices for their hard earned wealth. Investors can, for example, invest in computing / entertainment / eco-tourism / telecommunications, etc.

In fact, as computing develops and gives yet furhter untold levers to telecommunications, mass/industrial transportation of all kinds (trains and railways, planes and airports/airways, cars and garages/gas-stations/highways) will become less valuable.

Let’s spare those naive enough to continue to invest in the development of transportation. It is not a question of if they will suffer portfolio losses, but only a question of when.

Therefore let us all agree that we should not prop up a declining industry (industrial transportation) when we should be moving on to new and very likely unforeseen industries. These unforeseen industries will be discovered soon enough by those with wealth to invest.

We must of course start by building pedestrian accessible communities connected by high bandwidth digital communications (and, relatively, very costly transportation). That will only take 50 to 100 years to complete but legislators and policy makers must signal that shift now. It will require a near total rebuilding of nearly all our existing infrastructure (ie homes, retail, work-space, shools and hospitals). What a perfect opportunity for free-markets and investors!

The best sustainable human transport is the bicycle. Cheap, good for you and exceedingly clean. It only gets 10-12 mph for the average rider, but that is also the average for the rush-hour driver in LA, Atlanta, New York and many other major cities. Now if only people could be convinced to live somewhere close to where they work…

A major barrier to sustainable transportation is the underpricing of the cost of car travel and the resulting overconsumption of it relative to other modes. The company I founded and ran, Zipcar, is an example of how price signals begin to put use of the car in its place.

Zipcar (www.zipcar.com) lets people rent cars by the hour and by the day at hourly rates that range between $9-$14 (capping at maximum daily rates). When the person whose car is sitting in the driveway wants some ice cream, they jump up, get in the car, and go buy some. When the Zipcar member gets a yearning for ice cream, they reflect “ice cream now by car for a $9 travel cost or something else?” The something else might be to walk, bike or take the subway. It might be eating the cookies you have on hand or training yourself to think ahead.

Zipcar (technically called carsharing, and there are many companies that do this http://carsharing.net/where.html) makes many people car satisfied on few cars parked in fewer locations.

My current company is GoLoco, an online ride-sharing community (www.GoLoco.org). The idea here is that you can share costs, reduce CO2 emissions, and spend more time with your friends and neighbors when ride-sharing is fast and convenient. The average American spends $8,000 a year on their car and drives alone more than eighty percent of the time. That is a lot of wasted resources and investment.

Ultimately, we need to institute carbon taxes so that Nanos, SUVs, and city buses all pay according to what comes out of their tailpipes. We need congestion pricing to rationalize use of our congestion highways currently being consumed by individuals surrounded by their personal 120 square feet of metal. We need road taxes that charge us by the mile for what it actually costs to build and maintain those roads (my state of Massachusetts is currently underfunded by $1 billion a year just to maintain the status quo, thats $155/person/year).

There are so many externalities to count, but we need to start capturing at least the major ones if we hope to steer ourselves toward the sustainable future we seek. More of these ideas can be found in my blog http://networkmusings.blogspot.com/

After a quick read of his summary, it seems to me that Ausubel makes one huge assumption: that the use of resources will be able to increase at their current rate. In particular, he seems to think that energy production will somehow increase. If this is a bad assumption, then his conclusions concerning cars and airplanes, in particular, fall down — the energy won’t be available to create the hydrogen fuel cells he is depending on, nor the hydrogen for a massive air network.

Cars are extraordinarily inefficient, from a society-wide view: they are being operated a very small percentage of time, and so the productivity of capital is very low, while the use of buses and trains is orders of magnitude greater. In a society with resource constraints, the space (as in roads, etc) and capital wasted by private automobiles will no longer make sense.

On the other hand, I think his discussion of maglevs is very interesting. Although he seems to discount a great increase in trains, maglevs would seems to serve the same purpose, and I liked this quote:”‘Quarters’ could grow around a maglev station with an area of about 1 km2 and 100,000 inhabitants, be completely pedestrian, and via the maglev form part of a more or less vast network providing the majority of city services at walking distance”.

Isn’t the only truly known sustainable human transport the bicycle? Not that other forms can’t move toward sustainability, but all the ones listed are currently financially unsustainable in many ways. In this part of the country (San Diego California), they are making huge cuts to public transport, raising fares and the entire system is still bleeding cash due to rising construction costs. Worse, transit doesn’t go where people need it to go and therefore does not have it’s potential impact on congestion. Without a well-planned system everyone can sit in traffic in their cleaner cars!

In an effort to help, a small local non-profit looked for the Global Best Practices in transit planning that best matched out land use patterns and found it in Brisbane, Australia. We took the bold move to then hire independent experts to create a new plan. The FAST Plan (Financially Achievable, Saves Time) proposes a new kind of infrastructure in the US: the Quickway – dedicated, clean busways because market research shows that drivers do not change to transit unless they can get to and from where they need to go in equal to or less than they can drive there.

Now the only problem is overcoming the existing planning inertia. The FAST PLan saves time and save money, so we are building political support to convince local politicians.
Our biggest problem appears to be that transit planning has never been driven by the market research required to meet the needs of people who are willing to get out of traffic to actually shift to taking transit and “not invented here” is an unfortunately large factor.

Oh who will sing praises for the bicycle? Isn’t it about time that we appreciate what has always been a practical, fast, healthy, and (really) fun mode of urban transit? Call them “green” or “sustainable” if those are the buzz words of the day, but bicycles have always made sense. Perhaps when gasoline edges up to $10, $20, or beyond, we will collectively sing hosanna while biking through our cherished cities.

Travel over nontrivial distances at significant speeds is not and cannot be “green”. Large numbers of people traveling “at speed” need segregated routes for safety’s sake, if nothing else; this eats up land. Besides, speed requires energy, and all forms of energy, in massive quantity, are as ungreen as the James G. Watt Memorial Chuckhole. Back when I was a kid, “IS THIS TRIP NECESSARY” were commonplace; the message is appropriate now for other reasons. Meanwhile, I travel by bicycle, bus, subway… and Shank’s mare. (On occasion, I travel by Avis, but when I pay, it really Hertz.)

My feet. Besides sparing the environment further degradation, they have the benefit of giving me a vigorous cardiovascular workout every time I walk several miles. Seriously, if healthy people refused to use automobiles for short trips (a mile or less), I suspect we’d go far in giving ourselves and our planet a break, as well as lessening our dependence on foreign energy sources.

It’s clear that if we’re going to get to more sustainable transport, we’re going to have to see more of the costs of the transport we’re currently using.

This means that we need either to reduce subsidies to automotive transport, increase subsidies to more sustainable transport, or both. AND we need to do a better job of internalizing externalities of less sustainable transport. Carbon taxes, increased gas taxes, VMT taxes, and congestion pricing are all trying to get at this, but without consumers being fully aware of these costs, it’s going to be very difficult to get them to switch to transport modes with less environmental impact.

There is a technological device presently in use by nearly 800 million people worldwide that weighs less than fifty pounds, can be kept in a small apartment (requiring no garages and almost nothing in public parking), and needs only a narrow strip of path; it also uses 1/3 the energy of walking for the same distance, yet at three to four times the speed. Nothing better has been found for transport over distances of up to ten miles, and it is small enough to carry on any train or subway.

It is the bicycle. I use one myself; at 54 years old and not very athletic, I have ridden mine up to 100 miles in a day, though my usual commutes are 6 to 40 miles. The mechanical efficiency of the bicycle runs at over 98%, making the most efficient machine ever devised. And it doesn’t require broad roads that cover clog earth’s surface and segregate human communities; simple paths will do.

Friends of mine ride year-round in places like Minneapolis and Chicago.

You folks with engine-oriented solutions are way behind the times. The sustainable future is here, right in front of your own eyes.

Tell all those poor people who want those cheap Tata cars to STOP HAVING BABIES. Perhaps if we Americans have to be forced onto trains and buses, they should be forced into sterilization clinics, perhaps by using a lottery system.

Let’s make private jets illegal; in commercial jets remove the First class seats, but charge people above a certain income level first-class prices and give them the aisle seat in exit rows for their extra payments.

Let’s force every person who lives in New York County to take the train and bus and to use MetroCards whose cost is pegged to their income or net worth or gross income on their tax forms. (A password or a chip embedded in their Gov’t ID would help.) Poor people pay 10 cents per ride, and rich people pay $10 per ride. If a taxi or town car is ever to be allowed, it always has to be completely filled; the driver must stop for any poor person needing a ride and they get to pay their personal MetroCard fare.

Finally, in New York City, run 5-car trains every 3-4 minutes 24 hours per day. A form of this works in Barcelona, Madrid, Paris, and Toronto. If we force poor people or illegals to drive them, there would be less unemployment.

Track all private automobiles in Manhattan; no car may be driven from one point in Manhattan to another below 110 St.; it must only be used to leave or enter the island. The only exception is if more than 3 people are in the car for the majority of the trip.

Put a taxi meter in every car licensed in the New York City area. A tax is paid based on the price run up by use of the car. When the car leaves the Metropolitan area, the meter is turned off by the EZPass readers at the Bridges and tunnels.

We “may be able to afford green mobility”??? I imagine the inhabitants of Easter Island said “we may be able to afford saving the trees” a generation before deforestation killed them.

First, we need a National Efficiency Initiative, whereby we simply stop wasting so much:
(*) help people find good work and shopping closer to home — I heard a person who commuted 100 miles each way every day in an SUV to teach middle school. Then she drives 10 miles each way to a big-box store to “save money and time”. That’s insane.
(*) put in good light rail systems for when we have to travel farther
(*) make bicycling-safe streets

A mile not needing to be driven is 1000x better than a mile driven ‘cheaply’.

Once we’ve done the traveling, make the destinations more efficient:
(*) insulate every building up to R30 or above
(*) use existing efficient lighting that looks good and doesn’t create so much waste heat

None of this requires shivering in the dark, and actually makes life better.

Simultaneously, improve our energy sources:
(*) install huge wind and solar farms — as we find better, we can dismantle them w/o leaving toxic waste dumps behind. Besides, they don’t have to be perfect to be worthwhile.
(*) require passive solar design (like the Bushes themselves use for their house in TX)

Then we need to stop buying loads of “cheap” crap and buy fewer, better-made products that last, which don’t get shipped 9000 miles each way just to be “cheaper”.

If we can go from peace-keeper to warmonger in under a year, we can go from wasting to not wasting in under 10.

If the economics don’t work, recycling efforts won’t either.http://LivePaths.com blogs about innovative entrepreneurs that make money selling recycled items, provide green services or help us reduce our dependency on non renewable resources. These includes some very cool Green online ventures, great new technologies, startups and investments opportunities.

This is a fallacy, as it violates the laws of physics. Moving people or stuff across time and space means using energy. There just isn’t any way around it. We may be able to say that the end-use energy isn’t hurting the environment, but what about all the infrastructure needed that uses energy to be created? Sustainable human transport is a plate of raw vegtables you’ve grown yourself and a walking stick you picked up out of the woods. If you can figure out how to make an environmentally friendly bicycle, that would be more efficent though.
Fixing transportation will never help anything. We need to fix why we are traveling in the first place and start making our physical worlds more efficent.

From this article, it seems neither Revkin nor Ausbel ever even consider where is it that all these people need to go? Use that as basis for exploring solutions and you come up with two approaches:

1) This first one is easy. It uses existing technology and can be broadly implemented in a just few years. Institute telecommuting/remote work for all non-service industry employees. There you just solved inner-city pollution global warming, grid-lock, and improved labor efficiency.

2) Locate residences where people work. Or vice-versa, locate work where people reside – the business park. The service industry is already located close to home except where labor can’t afford the cost of living in the affluent communities they serve. Then you build affordable housing.

With only that, you get most people back to the most efficient means of transportation ever devised to get them where they most need to go…their feet.

For the near term, the greenest mobility solution is bicycling. Over the past year, my folding bike (I can recommend the Xootr) has almost completely replaced my car for personal transportation. I am an eye surgeon: my office is 2 miles from home, the OR is 9 miles from home, and once a month I put the bike on the train to Harlem and ride up to Columbia-Presbyterian medical center to teach glaucoma. Important accessories are: flashing LED lights (the Blackburn Mars 3.0 Combo is waterproof and visible from the sides), mirror, spare tube, tire levers and pump. Breathable, waterproof hooded jacket and pants (uninsulated) keep me reasonably comfortable in all conditions. Safety is reasonable provided one is willing to choose the safest route, even if longer; occasionally pull over to let a clump of traffic pass; look all ways at every intersection; slow down until eye contact is made at intersections.

What's Next

About

By 2050 or so, the human population is expected to pass nine billion. Those billions will be seeking food, water and other resources on a planet where humans are already shaping climate and the web of life. Dot Earth was created by Andrew Revkin in October 2007 -- in part with support from a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship -- to explore ways to balance human needs and the planet's limits.